Bannon

Ray is going moppy over every sh*t sandwich that is the banquet of his life, and the reporter being murdered, by his mentor, to protect the mentor and Ray, is just one of the sandwiches. The table on which all sandwiches are displayed is Ray being raped as a child by a priest, and the whole stinking mess is on the verge of collapse. Now is where the writing gets difficult, after two seaons of piling this mess up. This is where "Mad Men" failed, as Weiner made the mistake of thinking that several more seasons of character stagnation would be interesting. If Ray Donovan is going to be interesting to watch, it can't just be Ray getting mad, drunk, and laid, weeks after week. It may be true that it is pretty rare that people make fundamental change, but it is also true that many of the most interesting people do. I hope they find a way to make Ray Donovan interesting as the show continues.

They found some of Caspere's property (an expensive watch) in a pawn shop, and identified the seller as a gang member/head bad guy.

Oh, Ray is an out and out alcoholic as well. He gets hammered in response to emotional distress, as well as getting off with women. He's an addict, and a much more sad one than, say, Don Draper, because he isn't as adept at lying to himself. The needle on his pain meter is buried on the right side 24/7. I like the show, and it is well done, but it almost gets hard to watch Schreiber's portrayal, a great portrayal, of someone who just is in agony.

Nearly every scene leading up to the gunfight seemed awful to me. Horrible dialogue, cliched storylines, to the point that you really can't judge the acting. The gunfight was pretty well done, except in the ridiculous way it began (no, when trying to to stage a suprise raid on a building, you don't somewhat slowly walk up to it, with the guy with the battering ram not hugging the wall, so as to helpfully give people on upper floor windows a better angle to shoot the guy), and the way it ended (it made no sense for head bad guy to shoot his human shield). I swear to god, if they have one more dive bar scene with the existential woman singer strumming a few notes every 10 seconds, like a Saturday Night Live parody, I'm gonna Elvis my flat screen.

It's exceptionally stupid and lazy writing. What makes good noir is the contrast with lumiere. Of course, that requires imagination.

I've never seem him as anything but a violent sociopath. Violent socipaths can sometimes do stuff that makes peope laugh, but that doesn't make them not be violent sociopaths. The fact that some viewers are too morally cretinous to avoid idolizing violent sociopaths isn't a fault in the writing. I'm not much into quantifying who "deserves" to be murdered, but, no, short of a murderer himself, I don't don't think a violent pimp is worthy, compared to other people, of any sympathy when they are murdered.

Didn't Mickey murder a priest a few minutes into the debut episode because he deserved it?

Yeah, this is looking like a bad remake of "Chinatown" at this point. Having the Vaughn character remove the gold teeth could have worked great, but the set up, with the ridiculous fight in front of the professional criminals, was just dumb. Think of Bob Hoskins having all the criminals hung upside down on meathooks, when he wants to get them in line, in "The Long Good Friday".

Ray is a thoroughly addictive personality. When he becomes emotionally distressed, he pursues getting chemicals into his brain which alleviate the distress, such as those provided by an orgasm. He's also very physially attractive to women, which makes it easy to for him to have orgasms with women he has just encountered, especially when those women are drinking.

Milch was writing characters set in the latter part of the 19th century. They should have sounded stilted to us. The modern profanities were inauthentic, but the reason they were employed was due to the use of late 19th century profanity, to show the profane nature of Deadwood, would have had the effect of making the people sound like Loony Tunes' Yosemite Sam, and would have had an unintended humorous effect. This stuff is just low grade Mamet, a vastly overrated writer of dialogue, in my view.

He wouldn't, but why have him snapping pictures? Of what use are they to anyone? It's an old army buddy; so there is nothing revelatory in the two people speaking with each other. Why are the writers indicating the character is a closeted homosexual, and establishing that he is being covertly photographed? It's certainly possible that the purpose of the photographs is to find out who the other guy is, and somehow have him linked to some previous Black Mountain nefariousness, but there exists a strong possibility that threatening to force the character from the closet is going to be a way to advance the plot. I hope it isn't, because that's really stupid, but it is a real possibility at this point.

Why would he be snapping pictures of two men for tabloids or Vinci PD, if not for blackmail, given the suggestion that the two men had been sexually intimate?

I agree completely about season 2, but I disliked season 1 as well, since I find the weird cult-like entity doing dastardly things to children and women to be tiresome. Plain old murder wrapped around the pursuit of money, power, and jealousy, written to include characters who are mutifaceted and speak in an interesting, believable, fashion, is a better path to good drama, it seems to me. Of course, it's really, really, really, (really!) hard to created multifaceted characters who speak in an interesting, believable fashion, which is why so many writers follow the path of affected plot devices.

If they had written the part in a manner which made being gay blackmail fodder, sure, it could work, but they didn't do that. They just have a sexually confused/repressed young single guy, working a job where being straight or gay doesn't really matter. Sure, it could cause him some discomfort, but blackmail? That's just dumb. Also, I've spent way too many late evenings in bars. saloons, taverns,gin joints, buckets of blood, and any other description where hooch is served to the hoochhounds, in multiple states and countries, than I care to admit to. This joint rings about as true as bottom shelf scotch poured into a Johnny Black bottle. To me, it is ridiculously affected, poor, writing.

I've tried to like this show two years in a row, and have not done so. It is a bit unfortunate, since there is a structure here which could provide the basis of something quite good, especially this year. Corrupt municpal government is a theme which always interests me, in that it allows for a complexity and multidimensionality of characters. "The Wire" did not waste a lot of time on that most boring of plot devices, the sexually deviant serial killer. The Vince vaughn chracter could have been a really great exploration of the very ruthless non-sociopathic protagonist. Instead, the writing has featured really obvious mistakes, big and small. The recurring dive bar featuring the singer is really stupid. Note to writers; people who sell liquor by the drink don't hire live entertainment to provide atmosphere to a few angsty customer scattered about the saloon. They do so to fill the place, and if they can't, the saloon keeper abandons live entertainement. Which is why sparsely populated dive bars don't have live entertainment. On a larger note, the entire sexual perversion of the murder victim subtext is pretty lame, and yes, I know HBO is going to HBO. If they actually try to have a young, single character, blackmailed over being gay, that is just too stupid for words. More generally, it's a real error to have every single chracter be severely emotionally damaged, in that it is the collision of the well adjusted with the maladjusted which provides great entertainment. Think of Saul and Bullock in "Deadwood", for instance. Too bad, really.

If you are going to have a show which is heavily invested in the poltics of feudal and pre-feudal societies, in whch rulers employ arranged marriages to pursue political and territorial ambitions, then rape is going to be a recurring phenomena among the major characters, if the writing endeavors to portray human beings as they actually are. I really think that one of the reasons why Sansa' s rape has provoked such a backlash, beside it being intrinsically horrific, is the way rape has been previously employed by the writers. Jaime's rape of Cersei was just crappy storytelling, especially given how Jaime's character had been developed from the beginning of the show. It just didn't make any sense. Drogo's rape of Dany was shot pornographically, what with the cinematic backdrop and disrobing of the rape victim. After those two hideous missteps, the writers really have used up any charitable impulses the audience may have with regard to the employment of Sansa' s rape to advance the story, even though this instance was more organic, or not protrayed in as an obviously prurient manner. The writing can still recover (in Winterfell; Dorne really does seem to be consigned to being a bad Charlie's Angels episode) if they, RIGHT NOW, start showing that Sansa is determined to master her political and personal fate, and is going to use her physical victimization to exploit an opporutnity to slit the throats that need slittin', as Al Swearingen would put it. Actually, that wouldn't be a bad character to model Sansa after, now that I think about it. For those who watched that great show, do you recall how Al, embroiled n his conflict with Hearst, to the point of losing a digit, gave a soliloquy that recalled his (perhaps sexual) abuse as boy in a Chicago orphanage? The pain (as portrayed by the great Ian McShane) was striking, but the resolve it fired in him to never be outruthlessed again was striking as well. That's the only way to salvage this show, perched on the edge of steep slope. Finally, it really is stupid storytelling to have Littlefinger, Master Gatherer of Intelligence, be unaware of the nature of the bastard son of Roose Bolton, after the bastard son has been assigned many important military tasks, accomplished with massive cruelty, over an extended period of time.

Pinochet was a thug who murdered about 3200 people in order to maintain power, and eventually allowed himself to be removed from power, via elections, after 17 years. Castro murdered at least 3600 via firing squad in his first 17 years of despotic rule, and some 60,000 to 80,000 Cubans have died because Castro made it a crime to try to leave Cuba, and no, they didn't all drown trying to make the crossing in rickety boats. The were sometimes machine gunned in their rafts, and even dragged from the doorstep of foreign embassies in Havana, and then clubbed to death. The regime has now been in place for about 55 years, without ever allowing a real election involving competing political entities. That was the regime that was trying to aid communists in Grenada and other countries in the Western Hemisphere and Africa. When Ronald Reagan came to power in 1981, communist regimes in the previous 6 decades had murdered nearly 100 million innocent people in the effort to maintain power, and had really never allowed competing political entities to try to remove a communist regime via a fair election. 100 million murdered with zero real elections. That was the context. The communists in Nicaragua did not allow a real election until the support of the Soviet regime had pretty much ended. Some argue that the Sandinistas allowed an election in 1984, but this.... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nicaraguan_general_election,_1984 ....gives a pretty balanced overview as to why this is a dubious proposition. One does not have to idolize Ronald Reagan to recognize the context of titanic communist mass murder and totalitarian control on 5 continents, all supported by the first communist regime, equipped with nuclear weapons from the 1950s on, that was in place in January 1981. Yes, Soviet capabilities were overrated, but when the corpses are stacked to the horizon, vision can be obscured. It is telling that once the Soviet regime was no longer willing and able to forment such totalitarian mass murder and despotism, the world became, at least for a while, a rather more peaceful place, with free and fair elections rather more frequent.

Tribal wars had nothing to do with Germans being shot dead by soldiers for the crime of trying to leave East Berlin, while Germans in West Berlin could leave if they liked, but with exceptionally rare exceptions, never did. Tribal wars had nothing to do with the fact that when the guards at the wall were no longer willing to shoot people dead, a few years after the events now being portrayed in this show take place, the people in the east left in droves. Look, this isn't debatable, by any rational person with the ability to observe reality. The system of governance that Elizabeth and Phillip are working to advance was very, very, substantially worse, in terms of the legitimate use of violence, and in terms of creating conditions that made people's lives better, compared to the system of governance that Elizabeth and Phillip are working against.

In the books, does Sansa ever become aware of the role LF played in getting Ned executed? It is quite interesting to me that Show!LF has been able to conceal that from Show!Sansa, and it really opens the playing field, or make the ladder easier to climb, for LF, in that he can much more easily use the daughter of the Hand of the King, that LF helped get executed, to, in turn, get over on the noble who took over Winterfell after the decimation of the Starks. Now, if Sansa ever becomes aware of LF's role in getting her father beheaded (think about how the image of Ned's head impaled on a stake must be imprinted on her memory), and Sansa continues to get better at deadly politics, how she puts forth a false, yet different, front to both the Bolton's and LF, while endeavoring to get the throats slit that she thinks need slittin', could be a rich story arc.

I think it may the case that LF, contra what he said to Sadist Bolton, is actually well aware of what Ramsey is, and is going to use that quality to eventually attack the legitimacy of the Warden of the North. He knows that Roose can't allow his bastard to kill Sansa or to seriously harm her, but that Ramsey eventually will be Ramsey, and if LF can intercede on Sansa's behalf, LF becomes a hero to the population of the north, Roose is weakened, and, well, maybe the sadist gets what's coming to him. The man who made Roose Warden is dead, his successor is weak, and LF is always trying to climb the ladder. It wouldn't be the first time LF pretended to agree to an alliance, while looking to gut the supposed alliance partner.

I may be interpreting this statement incorrecty, but I'll observe that children are susceptible to being conned by parents who are intent on rationalizing their choices as parents. That gullibility of children has nothing to do. however, with the fact that a parent who puts his child in a distant second or even third place is owed nothing by that child. Being a grown up means carrying the weight of the choices you made, including the choice that your children were less important than your job. The world's a hard, hard, place place, even for people who fervently believe in a cause.They oughta' suck it up, and live with it, if their chlldren give them a complete education as to the full cost of the priorities they have chosen, as opposed to making a fatuous claim that their children have some obligation to them.

No, as I've already stated, in several places in this thread, if the government which is you are working against is sufficiently despotic, exposing your children to the risk of you engaging in criminal activity, in order to oppose that government, may be an ethical choice.Even so, however, a British subject, in England, in 1776, who secretly was spying on England, may well indeed have been a terrible parent. An American colonist, who purposely crossed the ocean, children in tow, or children to be born in England, while spying on Engand, was certainly being a terrible parent. Let us be clear, it is quite possible to be a great patriot to a cause, while being a hideous parent. In fact, I'd wager that most great patriots to a cause were hideous parents. That isn't to say the world shouldn't have great patriots; as someone else said in this thread there is more to being an adult than being a parent. I simply object to the notion that children owe their parents anything, when the parent has made a conscious choice to be a crappy parent. Everybody, and I mean everybody, has to carry the full weght of the choices thay have made. When you tell your children, by your behavior, that they are a distand second, or even a third, compared to the pursuit of your politics, it is perfectly reasonable and ethical for your children to in turn to go tell you to perform an anatomically impossible carnal act on yourself.

Exposing your children to the risk of your being imprisoned is part of your parenting. It is simply and wholly inaccurate to claim that a prent's willful decision to engage in illegal behavior is not part of their parenting.. John Gotti's decision to run a mob family was part of his parenting, because the decision to run a mob family has an impact on the risks his real family faces. Same as the fictional Walter White. same as the fictional Phillip and Elizabeth, and, no, it makes not a bit of difference that Philip and Elizabeth's motivations are political as opposed to monetary. It is to deny observable reality to claim that a parent's decision to be a criminal has nothing to do with the parents interaction with the parent's children. I know you disgaree, but Paige owes them nothing, and i will note that disgagreement every time that claim is made.

I dunno about you, but when I discover that somebody has been lying to me about very fundamental things, for years on end, I'm done asking them questions, because i make the reasonable conclusion that the person will not answer the questions truthfullly. Yes everybody lies. It's a trivial observation, in that it obscures that some people lie more consistently, about much more important things. It is simply false to think that everyone lies to the same degree, or that those differences in degree are irrelevant.

Well, the only time I'll note how hideous they are as parents at this time is when someone makes, wrongly, the claim that Paige owes her parents something. She owes them absolutely nothing, because Paige's parents have engaged in absolutely, completely contemptible behavior. If Paige's parents wanted to be treated with respect again, in their role as parents, the first thing they need to do is get down on their knees, perhaps literally, acknolwledge how contemptible their behavior has been, explain why the behavior was contemptible, apologize profusely, and outline a plan by which they hope to repair the damage they have done. Then, if there is evidence that they have made a good faith effort to execute that plan, and only then, Paige may have some obligation to her parents. To reiterate, I'll make this promise. If I don't have to read a comment from anyone with regard to Paige not giving something that is owed her parents, I will refrain from noting why this is not the case.